Over the course of this week, we’ll be sharing content about our favourite independent bookshops.

To start off the week, our Commercial Director Alexandra McDonald blogs about the one – one! – shift she worked in a bookshop.

Alexandra is a publishing trade die-hard who oversees sales, marketing, publicity, licensing, audio, ebooks, direct to consumer activity, export, distribution logistics, the Diffusion Prison Literacy programme and a couple of other things for SPCK. If she had spare time, she would like to spend it reading, yoga-ing and golfing but usually ends up spending most of it at the wheel of Mum's Taxi. You can follow her on Twitter at @alexmack2004.

Charities have received a bad press in recent years: the safeguarding scandal at Oxfam, the collapse of Kids Company and the hassling of the poppy seller Olive Cooke are but three examples. Sadly, the UK’s 165,000 small charities are suffering because of the cynicism created by the actions of a few of the big players in the sector.

Today is #EuropeanDayofLanguages. In the lead up to Frankfurt Book Fair, we chatted with our Rights Executive Stephen Tyres about his work handling rights with our partner publishers in other countries. SPCK has international partners in Turkey, Spain, France, Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany, among many others.

Gemma Simmonds, author of The Way of Ignatius, is on our blog for self care week, discussing how prayer is as essential to self-care as healthy eating, good sleep, regular exercise, and time with friends and family.

We all wish we could help our friends and family who are hurting. Sometimes, the things we say to try to comfort them can actually do more harm than good. Rachael Newham, author of Learning To Breathe, considers what we should and shouldn’t say when speaking to someone who has depression.

The holidays can be particularly hard for people who are in recovery from addiction. Christopher Dines considers ways that we can help ourselves and others during the holiday season, especially when we look to prevent relapse.

Youth workers have a lot demanded of them – socially, emotionally, and spiritually. Self-care is essential as a youth worker. Tim Gough takes us through some practical advice that will help you take care of yourself while you take care of others.

Tessa Buckley grew up near Epsom race course in Surrey. As a child, she spent a lot of time writing and illustrating stories. After leaving school, she studied interior design at Chelsea College of Art and worked in architecture and design in London until 1989, when she was forced to give up her career after developing multiple sclerosis. That was when she decided to fulfil her long- held ambition to become a writer. She has written extensively about health and nutrition and family history, and a new edition of her self-help book, The Multiple Sclerosis Diet Book, was published in 2017. She is also the author of two children’s novels. She now lives by the sea in Essex with her husband, where she is a regular contributor to the Essex Book Festival.

Leaders in the church are an instrumental part of delivering the Word of God. SPCK has compiled a list of books with these church leaders in mind.We hope the books we’ve chosen are beneficial for their professional endeavours as well as their own personal use.

Sarah Meyrick studied Classics at Cambridge and Social Anthropology at Oxford, which gave her a fascination for the stories people tell and the worlds they inhabit. She has worked variously as a journalist, editor and PR professional. She is the Director of the Bloxham Festival of Faith and Literature which is a small literary festival that takes place biennially in north Oxfordshire. She lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and has two grown up children.

On #ReadABookDay, we chat with her about writing, reading, and what’s next for her as an author.

Alexa is an author, editor and proofreader who has been writing extensively for children since 2002. Three picture books for SPCK Publishing, Noah and his Ark, Daniel in the Lions’ Den and Jonah and the Whale, were released in 2017. As well as children’s books, Alexa has also written the screenplays for the animation, It’s A Boy!, and for the film, My Month With Mrs Potter (MonkeyDribble Films), which won a Driver Award for Best Feature at the Coventry International Film Festival in 2016. Here, she chats with us about writing, the importance of friendship, and what she looks forward to as an author.

Rhoda Hardie is a freelance publicist and PR manager, based in Oxfordshire, who works mainly but not exclusively in book publishing. Prior to going freelance, Rhoda worked in marketing/PR roles at Oxford University Press, Oxfam Publishing and Lion Hudson plc. She can be contacted at rhoda.hardie.pr@gmail.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @rhodapr2013. Here, we chatted with her about her role as a publicist and the work she's currently on Mad or God? by Pablo Martinez and Andrew Sims, which we will publish on 19 July.

Dr Trevor Adams is Director of Passionate Dementia Care, which offers training and consultancy to churches and Christian organisations in supporting people living with dementia. Trevor is a nurse and specialises in dementia care. He holds a doctorate in dementia care, has written widely and spoken at dementia conferences and universities in the UK, Europe, Australia and Japan. Trevor is a Trustee of Dementia Friendly Pentlands, Edinburgh.

Dementia-friendly churches welcome people living with dementia and their family carers and offer them a sense of belonging. Many dementia-friendly churches work alongside other organisations that also look to make the community dementia-friendly, such as shops, gyms, and banks. Dementia-friendly churches clearly displays God’s presence with people living with dementia. God remembers them and that they are not forgotten.

Barbara Fox reflects on her work in journalism and how it led to the writing of Midwife of Borneo. Though she’d planned to write fiction if she ever wrote a book, her editing and journalistic skills helped her to write nonfiction. While we can often plan to write one book initially, we can sometimes end up writing an entirely different story should it compel us enough.

Terry Waite’s Out of the Silence was illustrated by his friend Jenny Coles. One simple drawing led to her drawing all of the pictures in his book. Here, she discusses how that evolved and what the process was like.

Philip Law is Publishing Director at SPCK. His previous books include A Time to Pray (Lion, 2002), The Story of the Christ (Continuum, 2006) and The SPCK Book of Christian Prayer (SPCK, 2009). Here, he discusses The One Hour Bible, our new book that he compiled and edited himself.

We read biographies to understand the world around us, to learn more about other people, and to see ourselves in others’ experiences. We don’t need to be a celebrity or a public figure to write a moving story. Books about ordinary people can be just as compelling as the biography of a famous painter or guitarist, if not more.

For our biography recommendations, we’ve chosen books about everyday people who simply and bravely told the stories they were meant to tell. They didn’t look for recognition or fame. They shared a story that mattered to them and, in turn, their work mattered to us too. It’s been a privilege to have published these books in 2018.

Recovery from addiction takes an incredible amount of personal strength and resilience, but it also requires tremendous support from friends, family, and professionals. Having a mentor can make all the difference when healing from an addiction.

Travel should be a part of one’s life – it is a way of growing and knowing what’s out there. But not everyone has the luxury of being able to travel to different places, which is why SPCK has chosen five personal accounts (and one biography) that explore the experience of travel.

At one point or another, we all rebel. It might not be particularly dramatic or explosive, but it’s something we all go through. Peter Grier chats with us about his form of rebellion, which is especially funny when considering that he’s just written a book!

Summer is often the time we wish for throughout the year and, if especially if you have kids, can’t wait to get away for some rest and relaxation. How do you spend your summers? Do you use it to jet off to the beach? Maybe you spend time at home with family and a barbeque. Maybe you take your children on an adventure. Before the summer comes to a close, we would like to introduce you to an adventure of a lifetime. (And it might even take a lifetime to complete). We’d like take you on a journey of a self-discovery with the greatest reward you could wish for, the hero’s journey.

Based on what Joseph Campbell calls ‘the monomyth of the hero’, Richard Rohr gives us a tour of the hero’s journey in our book club feature Falling Upward. This journey is vital in building up a character to who we now know them to be. Breaking the journey down into five stages, Rohr uses this template to illustrate how the heroes of old achieved their successes. In this post, we will take a look at each stage of the hero’s journey and how we can apply them to our own lives.

John Wyatt is Emeritus Professor of Neonatal Paediatrics at University College London. He is the author of Matters of Life & Death and Right to Die? Ahead of the release of his new book Dying Well, he discusses how we experience loss.